Summer Vacation 2013 No. 1

It's summer, and I have vacation days to burn off before the end of August. But I could not start until I have finished installing or updating all the iMacs and Mac Pros at the library. It is done now (or almost so, as I have discovered some damn bibliographic software that needs an update, too). So I started vacation #1 last Thursday.

I bought a new window-mounted air conditioner because the original Haier fell apart. I wanted a GE model that would cool my bedroom, but I had to drive to Noblesville to buy one from Home Depot. The unit was not hard to install once I found an extension cord for it because its power cable was shorter than the Haier's. The A/C is working fine.

I had to submit a warranty request to Fiskars for new handle bolts because two of those fell off the handle on my lawn mower this week. I will have to use the old reel mower or borrow Madre's gas-powered mower until the parts come in.

I got all the cables ordered and installed on the RΠ. The new RΠ terminal works fine, but is so slow on the Web.

I installed Faronic's DeepFreeze for the Mac on my MacBook Air to make maintaining the laptop easier. Of course, I have unfreeze it when I have to update software. And I have to store my work on thumb drives because a reboot wipes out everything.

I watched the town's Fourth of July fireworks display this evening from Madre's back yard. I had planned to watch from the back yard of my sister the ex-teacher, who is doing six weeks teaching science at Mount Holyoke (Caitlin Clarke's alma mater). My other sister the editor is living there for the time being. She kept bugging me with pictures of houses for sale in Upper Michigan; I had enough of this context-free talk, so I left. I later learned that her house is termite-infested to the point of being uninhabitable, so she moving out. Why the hell does my sister the editor want to live in Upper Michigan? If she wants to live in miserable weather, why not go to Seattle with the other learned and talented whackos?

I can understand why my sisters want to get out of Indiana. It is a miserable place for the educated. Proof of that appeared in the local Madison-Grant Shopper, where the local librarian had published a letter of complaint about the local high school transferring the school librarian to another job and not replacing her, demoting the library itself. I myself could not care less what goes on at the high school, but the students there will be getting the business end of a nasty stick if they are ill served by an understaffed library.

With crap like that, Indiana has no hope of retaining college graduates of any age. There is simply nothing for them here. The politicians and businessmen simply babble about lack of mountains and oceans, and cannot see that because it hurts their egos.